What ATI's Crossfire will bring to gamers

HKEPC HAS a whopper of a review with a look at ATI's Crossfire. They foresee what ATI's answer to SLI can bring to gamers around the world in terms of price and performance. They forced a Radeon X850XT to accept Crossfire, they benchmark a X700 against a 6600GT SLI and they even make two X300SE cards - yeah the ones with Hypermemory - dance to the sound of Crossfire. Crazy guys the ones from HKEPC. The piece is full of 3DMark figures and photos of the rig - a must read.

For those readers looking for the iRam review, it is here.

Rustedreviews checks the XFX Geforce 7800 GTX graphics card in SLI mode. At £720+VAT for the pair, you'll probably need to save quite a lot or take one interest free loan. Apart from pure power, you get two DVI to Sub converters, two SVIdeo cables, VIVO cable an a cool free tshirt and some free games. You might as well want to wait for the 7800GT to come in. The 6800Ultra sure has some bad times coming.

Gamepc continue the 7800 coverage with one model from MSI, the NX7800. Of course, they get tested in normal and SLI mode. With a core speed of 430MHz and a clock speed of 1.2GHz, it just overtakes its predecessor. The MSI is based on the reference design so don't expect any miracle from this single slot solution. Overclocking the card brought improvements of approximately 10% in any configuration.

Phoronix compares the Venice Core to the San Diego Core. We're talking of course of the AMD Athlon 64 CPU. The only difference between them being the difference in cache size. Phoronix compares a 3700+ San Diego to a 3200+ Venice using three different frequencies. The cache is beneficial in some aspect but no in others. But premium performance comes with premium price.

Tweaktown tests the Asus WL-HDD 2.5-inch which is a NAS and Wireless AP brought altogether. A nice idea indeed; that of combining storage and wirelessness. Not only can this piece of hardware download files from flash drive, but you can also upgrade the hard disk inside and it is not expensive. Surely though Asus will come with a speed upgrade beyond 802.11g for it.

Jonathan Hung from PC Perspective has a look at the Asrock K8 Upgrade 760GX motherboard, easily one of the cheapest socket 754 motherboards in the UK. It features a unique upgradable path whereby you can swap your socket 754 for a socket 939 one. It comes with a SIS 760GX chipset with integrated SIS Mirage2 graphics, six USB 2.0 ports, integrated audio, SATA II connectivity and more. No PCI Express or fancy features though at $58... who can complain.

Xbitlabs calls that product revolutionary. The EPSON P-2000 Multimedia Storage Viewer is seen as a great vacation companion or is it is yet another Personal Multimedia Player? It has a 40GB hard disk, a large high contrast LCD screen and a cute exterior. But it doesn't support RAW files nor does it apparently can play movies or sound. No FM radio or TV Tuner but a high resolution of 640x480. I prefer to look elsewhere.

And, a reader writes: "Just a quick thing in your hardware roundup concerning the G70 pieces, noticed on the heatsink it said overclocked, so I presume that has something to do with the unusual clock frequencies and ASUS claiming theirs is overclocked when its not. Another thing I noticed in the pictures is the extra small heatsink which is used to cover the HSI bridge on the 6600's. Would this suggest that even though its a PCIe card that it is STILL not PCIe native?! Would that also then be a kick in the pants for the AGP folk, seeing as the card is native of AGP but not being used like it?" Anyone's guess?

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